Die Kirche bleibt im Dorf (2012) Poster

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7/10
Feature length special comedy
kosmasp4 August 2013
The humor that is used here, is often quite special to the south part of Germany. So it is a fair estimate that about 90 % of the people who went to see it in a cinema, came from that region. It still was so successful as to spawn its own TV series, which I have not watched yet. But I imagine that it is as funny as this movie.

Series aside, which should deal with an overall arc that is happening before the events of the movie, we get a movie that is about a church and two villages that are not really liking each other. Apart from a man and woman from each side. Almost like a West Side story, without the singing, but with a larger scale problem. The hate for each other creates quite a few funny moments. Some of the jokes might be hard to get if you're not familiar with the way people live there, their habits, even more so, if you're not German. A special movie then, but one that can be fun
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4/10
Walter Strümpfelbach meets William Shakespeare
Horst_In_Translation10 February 2015
Warning: Spoilers
"Die Kirche bleibt im Dorf" or "The Church stays in the Village" is a 2012 movie from director Ulrike Grote. Despite being more known as an actress, her so far biggest achievement was probably an Academy Award nomination in the short film category. This movie here is probably only really interesting for Swabians living in some village. It's about a wealthy American, Mr. Jones, who comes to the central characters' village and wants to buy their church for up to 10 millions. Of course there are two feuding families in the village. One wants to sell and the other doesn't. And then there is also a Romey and Juliet like love story. And the village people are scared of a curse when somebody is bleeding randomly out of their nose.

The English language humor coming when the people talk to Mr. Jones is not particularly funny either. Otto Waalkes did this much more entertaining many many years ago. It's all very stereotypical and not particularly creative or interesting. The only scene which made me smile a bit was when they locked the one guy away as he disagreed with them. However, in retrospective I have to say it was quite disrespectful as well. The film's biggest weakness was possibly the ending. It's one of these where they fix everything that went wrong in the last 80 minutes in the final 5 minutes without any realistic approach, just for the feel-good sake of the audience. Very disappointing. They certainly should have gone for a happy ending if they wanted to, but maybe without sacrificing all credibility. I cannot recommend this.

It seems most viewers disagreed with me though as this was turned into a TV series right afterward and next year there will be a second movie as well. I would be surprised if this movie is shown somewhere outside the German-speaking countries, so my suggestion is you watch a television episode of the show, decide if the dialect-focused humor is your cup of tea and if so, you watch the movie. Oh yeah, and on a final note, the intro and outro reminded me of "Catch Me If You Can".
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